Guardian Writer Dave Hill On Politics, People & Goings On

Ray Lewis Affair

July 04, 2008

"In a mere two months in office Boris Johnson has already suffered the second resignation from among his most senior officials - Deputy Mayor Ray Lewis following Deputy Chief of Staff James McGrath two weeks ago. In my entire eight years in office I suffered only one enforced resignation of any of my most senior officials, Lee Jasper - and that only after seven years - and this extreme contrast shows vividly the incompetence of Boris Johnson and his administration. It is an equal crisis for David Cameron who, it should be remembered, chose to make his first photo opportunity as Tory leader with Ray Lewis."

I filed this at around 4.00 this afternoon. By 5.30 I was worrying it had been overtaken by events. There again, maybe it turned out to be a bit prescient...

Twice this week I’ve seen Boris Johnson devoid of jokes, Latinisms, ironic distance and all his other hallmark traits. In their place has been first sobriety then measured rage. The sobriety was on Wednesday when he was joined by Sir Ian Blair to talk about knife crime, which has now claimed its eighteenth teenage life of the year in London. The measured rage came yesterday, when he defended Ray Lewis, his deputy for youth, against allegations of misconduct following separate inquiries by The Guardian and Channel 4 News.

I asked Lewis at the press conference yesterday why it was that Newham Council had stopped funding his Academy. He replied that it was funding it. Afterwards he again claimed that some funding was continuing, but Newham has now confirmed that that was wrong. A spokesman says:

"In the current financial year, there is no general financial support provided to Eastside. It ended at the end of March because the council changed the way it awards funds to groups and organisations within the voluntary, community and faith sectors. Instead of supporting groups with grants, the council now commissions the services it requires through an open, transparent and competitive procurement process. EYLA were not successful in the process.
What Mr Lewis may have been referring to is an individual support package for one young person that was procured in error by a social worker. This was stopped immediately because Eastside is not one of the preferred providers with whom we have a contract. No more than four weeks money at £250 per week would have been paid."

I didn’t expect such a show of defiance from Boris Johnson and Ray Lewis yesterday. I wasn’t expecting defiance at all. Given that James McGrath had resigned over a tactless remark about Caribbean Londoners made during an interview it seemed unlikely that the mayor and his deputy would dismiss all the allegations against Lewis as “rubbish” and the product of a politically motivated smear campaign. Perhaps those taunts from fellow Tories that he’d caved in to “political correctnesss” over McGrath got under the new mayor’s skin.

The website of Lewis's Eastside Young Leaders' Academy makes interesting reading. John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York is one of its two patrons. The playwright actor Rudolph Walker OBE is the other. Steve Norris, former Tory MP and London mayoral candidate and Johnson appointee to the boards of TfL and the LDA, chairs its board. Francis Maude MP is on the board too, along with several businessmen.

"He is tough, loving, uncompromising, charismatic and achieves astounding success in turning round some of the most difficult boys around. But because he identifies the slop and sentimentality in the schools and youth justice circles as the problem, he has been scorned, vilified and ostracised by the usual suspects as ‘authoritarian’. Thus the tragedy of our times."

"I believe that my deputy Mayor Ray Lewis is being made to suffer now because he has had the guts to serve in this administration and because he has had the courage to speak out against a stifling orthodoxy that has failed too many of our children."

How far will he push the line that it's all a conspiracy by "the politically correct"? Could be very risky.

After the Lewis press conference Matthew Taylor and I went to the Guardian office where Matthew headed for the first floor to write our piece for today's paper and I headed for the fifth floor to add what I could to what Jenny Percival had already compiled for the website. At that point its headline and Jenny's article both referred to some of the allegations made against Lewis dating from his time as a minister in east London as being sexual in nature. Soon after I arrived a phone call came through from the mayor's office objecting to this. Following hurried consultation it was removed. Someone noticed that it had also disappeared from the BBC website's coverage, although as you can see here, Tim Donovan pursued this angle in his interview with Lewis.

If other sites came under the same pressure they ignored it. Indeed, they've been far less hedged than Guardian had been. The Standard's headline refers to "sex abuse" and Pippa Crerar's piece to "sexual harassment." The Telegraph's headline mentions "sexual impropriety" and its piece, "sexual harrassment." The Times is more cautious, writing of "sexual misconduct" while the Independent is less so, with a headline about Lewis's "sexual past" coming back to "haunt him" announcing a story which leads on claims of "sexual harassment" and "sexual misconduct."

Of course, all these terms are general ones. No one has made specific allegations about sexual wrong doing by Lewis, nor did they during the press conference although Jon Snow and Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News, which had been making inquiries separately from the Guardian, could have done so. They had had more luck than the Guardian in getting the Bishop of Chelmsford to go into detail about why his diocese had "restricted" Lewis' entitlement to work as a minister in its diocese. But as their report shows, the Bishop withdrew his original statement to them after the mayor's office threatened legal action.

Today, Johnson will announce details of the "independent inquiry" he promised to hold into the claims made against Lewis. A great deal will depend on the terms and scope of this inquiry and who conducts it. Unless they are a lot more independent of the Conservative Party than the membership of the supposedly independent Forensic Audit Panel, it is hard to imagine anyone accepting its conclusions as legitimate.